


I Can't Ask These Questions That Cannot Be Answered

by vain_glorious



Series: Matters Unresolved [2]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Conspiracy, Friendship, Gen, Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-27
Updated: 2013-05-27
Packaged: 2017-12-13 04:39:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/820067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vain_glorious/pseuds/vain_glorious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sheppard returns to what's as close to home as he can get on earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Can't Ask These Questions That Cannot Be Answered

Sheppard had rarely been inside McKay’s quarters on Atlantis. He vaguely remembered a mass of electronics stolen from various departments, a wall of framed diplomas, piles of science journals, and an unmade bed amid scattered personal objects. Kind of like a dorm room that got in a fight with a chemistry lab and then exploded. He hadn’t really had a leg to stand on because his own quarters were breeding giant mutant Ancient dust bunnies, but he’d mocked McKay anyway because it was so satisfying.

 

Teyla’s quarters had always been nearly sterile in comparison. She picked up after herself and kept the place tidy. Sheppard had always credited it to some innate feminine domesticity (no, he never told her that because she would have knocked his front teeth out) or because Athosians just didn’t have the propensity to collect crap.

This was usually when he slammed his mind shut, went for a run, found a flirty British medic, or otherwise occupied himself. There was no point in going there. Now, it was equally pointless. He realized the rooms in his memory were empty, submerged under miles of ocean in another galaxy. He wasn’t sure if this was better or worse. It meant his vague theory that someday the Pegasus voodoo would wear off and he could go through the ‘Gate again was hopeless. But he didn’t like to think about Atlantis being cold and empty at the bottom of the sea. It bothered him more than it should, might have made him very angry if he’d learned of it before.

Except that Rodney and Teyla were here, now. Not fragmentary voices and splices of memory, but sitting in the front seat of the SUV only inches away from Sheppard. They were arguing about which highway to take from the airport to their house, which kind of ruined the poignancy of the moment.

It gave him the chance to sit in the backseat and act like he hadn’t totally lost it in baggage claim. That was high on his list of things he was going to pretend hadn’t happened. He also took the moment to pop some pain pills. Teyla had unknowingly squeezed the hell out of his stitches and they were stinging angrily.

“Are you alright, John?” Teyla asked, catching him in the act of tucking the prescription bottle away. She was turned halfway in her seat, legs tucked up so she could look backwards at him while talking to McKay. “Are your injuries bothering you?”

“Long flight,” Sheppard lied. At the same time, McKay looked at him in the rearview mirror and rolled his eyes.

“He fell out of a helicopter,” McKay said. Teyla looked sideways into the driver’s seat, expression creased. “It’s like a car,” he clarified, “except with no doors and it flies with a propeller. You’ve seen them in the sky.”

That wasn’t exactly an accurate description of any helicopter ever, let alone an Apache, but Sheppard let it go. Teyla was looking backwards with another question on her face, one that probably would have meant explaining a lot more things.

“I hear you can drive now,” Sheppard said, changing the subject.

“It is true.” Teyla nodded her head and smiled. “Rodney taught me.”

“Hey,” McKay said, raising one hand sharply. “I explained the fundamentals and theory of driving. I take no responsibility for how she’s implemented them in practice.”

“I am a good driver,” Teyla protested, and McKay snorted.

Sheppard leaned back against the seat, folding one arm around his abdomen.

“She a speed demon?” he asked McKay. “Got a lead foot?”

“No,” McKay said, and laughed. “She’s like…a grandma with occasional road rage. If it wasn’t going to get her killed someday, it’d be hilarious.”

“Other drivers do not obey the rules,” Teyla muttered. “It is frustrating.”

“I gotta see this,” Sheppard said. “We can fix the grandma thing, too.”

“I didn’t go half way across the world so you could give Teyla driving lessons,” McKay said. “And you aren’t allowed to teach her anything.”

Since to his memory, McKay had never been in a car that Sheppard was driving, Sheppard wasn’t sure where he got off on the following rant that assumed he was both the world’s worst and fastest driver. The last point might have had a bit of truth, but McKay was also taking both hands off the wheel while making it. Sheppard let him go on, anyway. The diatribe was a familiar sound and even if it was ridiculous, there were a lot of worse and also much truer things McKay could have said instead.

The painkillers were kicking in, making Sheppard feel fuzzy and tired. He curled up against the side of the door, making a pillow out of his arms. He saw Teyla put a hand out and touch McKay on the shoulder.

“He’s sleeping,” she said. “Let him.”

“He could have slept on the plane,” McKay grumbled.  
  
“You could have stopped talking on the plane,” Sheppard tried to retort, but it came out in a mumble.

Sheppard slept the whole hour it took to reach their house. He woke when the car rolled to a stop and he heard Teyla and McKay shifting in their seats, whispering to one another.

“I’m awake,” he murmured, even though he’d barely opened his eyes.

He didn’t really need the help, but he let them get on either side of him as he crutched into the house.

“You should rest,” Teyla said.

Sheppard had the idea that even though it was dark outside, it was far too early to sleep.

“There’s a futon downstairs,” McKay said.

They both tried to take him down, making the stairwell so crowded all three almost fell. Finally Teyla wrapped his arm around her neck, took his crutches away, and handed them to Rodney.

“I can walk,” he muttered, since now she was basically carrying most of his weight. Rodney followed behind, crutches in hand.

They dropped him on a blue futon and Teyla actually went about tucking him in. Sheppard wasn’t sure if it made him feel childish, invalid, or kind of nice. She pressed her forehead against his, again, and he took the opportunity to kiss her on the cheek. He heard Rodney make a noise that was either irritation or anger. For a split second, Sheppard went to shoot McKay a _what the hell is your problem_ look. Just as quickly, he remembered that in all likelihood he himself was McKay’s problem, and flopped backwards.

“Goodnight,” Teyla said. McKay echoed it, sourly.

He drifted off to the sound of their footsteps climbing the stairs. McKay was grumbling and Teyla hushed him until they were on the first floor.

“He is not well,” Sheppard could barely hear her voice.

“I didn’t abduct him from a hospital,” McKay retorted, clear as day. “He was drinking lager and hitting on Frauliens. He’s fine.”

“He nearly died,” Teyla said, louder.

“That was a very long time ago,” McKay said. “Other than the fact that the U.S. military apparently forgot to issue him a parachute, he’s fine.”

“Your anger helps no one,” Teyla said, and the floorboards creaked as she walked away from him.

“Helps me!” McKay yelled after her. Then the floor squeaked some more and if they were still talking, he couldn’t hear them.

~

Sheppard woke up while it was still dark out. His watch said it was early afternoon, but he’d never changed it from Germany. The house was silent and still, and he didn’t really want to walk around the home that Teyla and McKay shared in the Texan suburbs. That would just feel surreal and bizarre.

He no longer felt remotely sleepy, instead recognizing the vaguely confused wakefulness of jetlag. In the end, his bladder made the decision for him. Sheppard kicked the sheets free with his good leg and sat up, grabbing in the dark for his crutches. He couldn’t find them. He had a moment where he envisioned McKay hiding them, some kind of passive-aggressive revenge assuring that he’d still be in the basement when they woke up. But then he turned on the lamp on the table by the futon edge and when he stopped blinking against the glare, his crutches were right there against the far wall. He would have felt kind of dumb for accusing McKay, but then he had to do a complicated hop/lunge move to get to them. As he fit each one into place, he was pretty sure that leaving them across the room was totally passive-aggressive vengeance.

The lamp light gave him the first view of the room he’d slept in. There was a flat screen television on the wall facing the futon, above a pile of videogame consoles and a DVD cabinet. They’d put him up in their TV room. At least he’d have something to do to kill the jetlag besides snoop through their house. Sheppard gripped the handholds of his crutches and went looking for the bathroom.

The bathroom made him laugh and feel sorry for McKay. The essentials were clearly his doing: plain blue plastic liner shower curtain and more or less matching blue bath mat and towels picked with efficiency not style. The rest had to be Teyla, even if it was a side of Teyla no one on Atlantis had ever seen. The top of the toilet tank was covered with those little decorative geometric boxes and woven baskets of body lotions and sprays from Bed Bath & Beyond or wherever. There were more on the edges of the tub and beneath the sink, the contents of each collection of bottles a different shade of pastel and all completely full and untouched. This was a very weird side of Teyla.

He could have used a shower after having crashed in the clothes from the flight, but he wasn’t sure where his bag was. Exiting the bathroom, he crutched down the hallway back to the futon. Out of curiosity, he poked the only other door in the hallway with the bottom of a crutch. It didn’t budge, so he put in the effort of trying the handle. It was locked, which probably meant it was McKay’s office and he was paranoid.

Sheppard went back to the main room. From this angle, he could see the wall behind the futon and stopped cold. All of the other walls were bare, making the only décor in the room the unframed Johnny Cash poster taped to the wall. He stared at it, unsure how he was supposed to feel. He settled on weird, and then he stopped looking at it because it made him think about the last room it’d been hung in.

His bag wasn’t anywhere in the room, so Sheppard reluctantly crutched upstairs to look for it. He guessed he was actually going to snoop all over the house. He vaguely wondered if he would encounter any more of his possessions. McKay wasn’t allowed to be too much of a dick if he had a bunch of Sheppard’s stuff that he’d kept for purposes other than a bonfire. Unless the poster was Teyla’s doing.

The rest of the house was sparsely decorated and he didn’t find anything else pilfered from his quarters on Atlantis. He also didn’t find his bag, and he gave another thought that it’d been hidden so he couldn’t leave again. More likely, it was still in the car.

He did find that McKay had a cat. It was a skinny little calico thing that woke up when he walked by it, rolled on its back, and stared up at him through slitted eyes. Then it righted itself, grabbed Sheppard’s foot with its two front paws, and sank its teeth into him.

“Hey,” Sheppard snapped softly, not actually feeling a thing since it had chosen to attack his cast. “Off!” He tried to kick it lose and wondered if plaster was good for cats or if he’d just accidentally poisoned McKay’s pet. The thing’s claws were stuck and he had to reach down and unhook it, sending it sprawling across the floor. “Stupid cat.”

The cat stalked him as he continued his search for his luggage, still batting as his feet until it lost interest. In the dining room, Sheppard found a round table piled high with files and envelopes. He didn’t mean to, but he read the label on one of the square envelopes: _SGC Security Visual Log January_. He only picked it up because the rest of the date was obscured, and then a small silver disc fell out into his hands.

That was how he ended up kneeling – on one knee with the cast sticking out goofily – in front of McKay’s television, trying to figure out which slot in the pile of various media players matched the size of the disc. It wasn’t that Sheppard was that dumb, it was that McKay had about ten different kinds. Eventually he found it, and then had to determine which remote control turned what system on. He was vaguely surprised McKay didn’t have some kind of pass code as well.

Sheppard scrabbled backwards, hoisting himself back up on to the futon as static filled the screen. At first, he thought he’d assembled it wrong and was thinking he might just lie back down and see if sleep would come. He didn’t want McKay coming down and finding he’d either utterly failed to get the television to work or possibly broken it by trying. But then an image filled the screen, in the strange green tones of night-vision film.

True to the envelope label, it was footage from a security camera in the SGC. Specifically holding cell 3B, according to the helpful text on screen next to the date stamp. The green and black tones on the screen were of the room: four walls, a small table, a bed, and a lump in the bed that was probably either Teyla or Ronon. The lump was much too small to be Ronon.

Sheppard hit the fast-forward button, already questioning why he watching it. He didn’t need to see Teyla in custody – who was he kidding,in fucking _prison_ –by the people whose uniform she’d worn for three years.

On screen, Teyla woke and sat up. She immediately rose, grabbing what looked to be a stack of clothes lying beneath the table and vanishing from view of the camera. If she thought she’d have the privacy to dress in the bathroom, he knew she was wrong and it made him abruptly much angrier.

When she emerged from the bathroom, Sheppard hit play and slowed the film down to normal speed. Even though he knew she was upstairs sleeping and looked fine, he wanted to make sure that she’d been just as fine nearly a year ago. Teyla set her pajamas back under the table and went about making her bed. It looked like she was wearing the same clothes, though, and Sheppard thought it was pretty likely she’d been issued two of the same uniform and designated one as nightwear.

Bed made, Teyla took a seat on the top sheet and folded her legs underneath her body. Then she looked directly at the camera. If it was Ronon, the camera would be ripped off the wall and stomped into a million pieces. Teyla just looked at it, her gaze enough to make Sheppard want to melt from horror and shame. Her face was set in a neutral expression, and he was selfishly thankful, because if she’d looked upset or scared he sincerely might have broken McKay’s expensive television.

The screen flared, the image going bright green, then switching over to a normal black and white feed as the lights in the room were turned on. He wondered if Teyla had been allowed to control even that.

“John?” came Teyla’s voice, and Sheppard flinched so hard he nearly launched himself off the futon.

The security tape had no audio.

He pulled his eyes from the screen, finding Teyla standing at the base of the stairs and peering at him. His heart somewhere in his throat, Sheppard reached immediately for the remote control, trying to blacken the screen. He fumbled the remote and it did nothing, until he accidentally hit the pause button and the picture on the screen froze.

Teyla stayed where she was, looking at him like she thought he might bolt if she spoke. He realized he’d responded like she’d caught him watching porn or Days of our Lives, and tried to get his reaction under control.

“Hey,” he said, and it came out breathily and not at all under control. He tried again. “Good morning.” Steadier.

“Good morning.” She padded across the carpet until she was closer, casting one eye at the television.

“I, um, found it upstairs,” he said. He didn’t really have a reason why he’d decided to watch something that was probably veering pretty close into voyeurism and had the only possible outcome of making him furious. He didn’t know what to say about that.

“The SGC sent it,” Teyla said, sinking down on to the futon beside him. She folded her legs up and under, just like she had on the video a few seconds ago. “They –”

“I didn’t know,” he interrupted, having barely heard her first sentence. “Teyla, I had no idea they’d done that to you.”

“Rodney told me,” she answered, far too calmly. “I did not think you did.” He took a big breath to say it again, and she put her hand lightly on his knee, looking at her own grey face on the screen. “I knew it then, as well.”

“I would have stopped it,” he said, trying to not yell because the overly calm thing she was doing was probably because she thought he was going to flip out. “I would have gotten you out of there. If I had to shoot every last person in the mountain.”

She patted his knee. “I do not think that approach would have worked,” and at least she sounded a little amused.

“Maybe not,” he agreed, finding his voice had gone a bit softer. “Would have felt good, though.”

“Yes,” she said, which was kind of telling in itself.“I am not angry with you,” Teyla continued. “You should not blame yourself.”

He grunted, and she went on. “I don’t believe your presence would have changed anything. Rodney says you cannot be near the Stargate without becoming ill.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It sucks.”

“I was held right next to the Stargate,” she pointed out, hand still patting his knee like he was child.

“Yeah, well,” he said.

“Colonel Carter worked on my behalf,” Teyla said. “She was not successful.”

“Colonel Carter probably listens when people tell her she’s not allowed to do stuff better than I do,” he muttered.

Teyla gave him a look and removed her hand from his leg. “We will not be able to find Ronon if you and Rodney are busy competing in who can be angrier.” And she suddenly sounded tired.

He didn’t make her repeat herself. “Okay,” he said, and nodded. Then, “At the very least, if I’d been around, you wouldn’t have had to marry Rodney.”

This got a big, full-color smile. She swung her legs back down and stood up. “Come upstairs for breakfast.”

“They hurt you?” he asked, because he had to know, even if it shattered her smile.

Teyla met his eyes. “No,” she said. “I was not mistreated.”

Other than being locked in a cell underground for no reason, but he didn’t say that aloud. She picked up his crutches from where he had dropped them on the rug and handed them over. “Breakfast,” she said again.

“Which one of you kept my poster?” he asked, as he followed her upstairs.

“Ronon,” she said over her shoulder, and something twisted so hard in Sheppard’s chest he almost missed the next step.

~

Sheppard hadn’t ventured into the kitchen before. He should have; his bag was sitting on the floor next to the sink. He blinked at it for a few seconds before climbing up on one of the stools against the counter. It was actually a little perilous with one leg and for a second he thought he was going to fall on his ass.

Teyla moved around the kitchen, finding him silverware. She paused, a bowl in one hand and a plate in the other. “We have cereal and frozen waffles,” she said, sounding almost apologetic. “And many different kinds of Hot Pockets.” She frowned. “I do not like those.”

“Rodney’s a gourmet?” he cracked, and Teyla made a face. “Cereal’s good.” He followed her eyes to the top of the fridge. “Hey, you have fun packs!”

Teyla looked embarrassed, but she brought over the package of tiny, multi-colored boxes anyway. “Rodney thought it was a good way to expose me to the diversity of your breakfast foods,” she said. “I did not realize they are for children. They’re very…sugary.”

He took the bowl from her. “That’s why they’re good,” he said, ripping open two different kinds and upending the bags.

She brought him some milk, face unconvinced, and helped herself to something that looked like raw oats and was probably disgustingly healthy. As she climbed up on to the stool beside him, he had a flash of how bizarre this was: eating cereal with Teyla in Rodney’s kitchen in freaking Texas.

“Rodney not up yet?” he asked, trying to ignore the feeling.

“It is a little early for him. We heard you moving around,” she said. “He told me to come downstairs and -” she looked amused “- knock you unconscious.”

“He hasn’t had his coffee yet,” Sheppard said, forgivingly. “That’s mean even for him.”

Teyla gave a small shrug and took a bite of her cereal.

“Jet lag,” he explained. “I wasn’t snooping; I was looking for my bag in all the rooms except the kitchen. By the way, I like what you’ve done with the place.”

“I have not been here very long,” Teyla reminded him. “Rodney furnished it.”

“Oh, right.” He paused. “How long have you been here, Teyla?”

“About six months,” she said, but looking at him like she knew that wasn’t the question he really wanted to ask.

The sugar in Sheppard’s cereal was scraping the roof of his mouth. He swallowed, ran his tongue over it.

“How long were you locked up for?”

“I was at the SGC for around the same amount of time,” she said, and Sheppard could feel his jaw clench again.

He did the math in his head: Teyla and Ronon had probably been taken prisoner right about the time he deployed to Afghanistan. Maybe a little bit before. He might have been lazing around Moody for weeks or even months while this happened.

“I –”

“You have already apologized,” Teyla interrupted. “I said I do not blame you.”

“I haven’t apologized for going dark after I left Atlantis,” Sheppard said. “I pretended like it never existed. Things might have been different if I’d stayed in touch. I do have a friend or two in high places.” He had one, sort of, maybe if he counted General O’Neill’s friends he would have a total of two.

Teyla shook her head. “I am not angry with you.”

“You should be. McKay is.”

“Then you should apologize to him.”

“I did,” Sheppard said, putting down his spoon. “When he found me. I got the impression he was holding back on the yelling until after he got me to come home.”

“We missed you,” she said. And Sheppard decided to focus on how she wasn’t disputing that McKay was totally still fully loaded. “Regardless of the events that followed, we would have liked to have known you were well.”

McKay would have been yelling, calling him names, probably frothing at the mouth. He would have infinitely preferred that to Teyla’s simple honesty. It wouldn’t have hurt as much.

“You are well?” Teyla asked, and the question was probably genuine but she could have been checking that she was allowed to make him feel like crap. Or she was just changing the subject because she was nice like that.

“Yeah,” he said. He gave a hand wave to the bullet wound and the leg cast. “Other than the part where I myself can’t fly, yes. The ‘Gate stuff resolved itself.”

“Good,” Teyla said, and then she was poking him in the trache scar on his throat with her index finger. “What is this is from?”

“They cut a hole for a breathing tube,” he said. “I was out of it for a while.”

She nodded, and he hoped it didn’t sound like he was still justifying pulling the vanishing act.

To an extent, it was true. But after a month in Bethesda, he’d been capable of sitting up and hitting keys on a laptop. They’d put something in his IV that had made him loopy as hell, and he’d sent a number of utterly incoherent angry flailing e-mails to _thank the_ _merciful gods_ the only recipient who would pretend they’d never happened. General O’Neill had only replied to the first message, with the one-liner “Hell of a drug, huh?” Sheppard had been completely mortified when he was lucid enough to realize what he’d done, and reasonably furious at the nurses for letting someone as high as he had been have access to the internet. He’d never used it again.

And now he was realizing that he did have an e-mail address, presumably the same one Rodney had been trying to contact him with, and that sucked.

~

McKay came downstairs, reaching the kitchen at the exact moment the coffee timer dinged. The face Teyla made implied that the timing was typical, and Sheppard would have liked to sprint across the kitchen to beat him to the pot just to disrupt the routine, but he didn’t think he could accomplish it without knocking the stool over and taking McKay out with his crutches.

“Hey,” Sheppard said.

“How was the Special Olympics triathlon this morning?” McKay snapped, sweeping past him.

“The triathlon has swimming and biking, too,” Sheppard said.

He looked twice and realized McKay was holding the little calico cat he’d seen earlier. It got tucked under his arm as he poured himself coffee.

“Your cat attacked me,” he said.

“Ohh,” said McKay, which sounded like it was to the cat and also sounded distinctly like praise. He looked up and found Teyla. “You kicked Bitey out of the bedroom?”

“His name is Bitey?” Sheppard asked.

Teyla didn’t even look up from her breakfast. “Sleeping with animals is unclean.”

“It is not,” McKay huffed. “Bitey bathes more often than you do!”

“I do not bathe by licking myself,” Teyla answered. To Sheppard, “I call it Asperasa. Rodney calls it Bitey.”

“Asperasa?”

“Biter,” she said. “In Athosian. It is not inaccurate.”

Before the conversation could get worse – and before Teyla and Rodney could act any more freakishly _married_ – Sheppard hopped off of his stool and scooped up his bag. He asked where he could get a shower and was directed upstairs – Rodney said Teyla had clogged the one downstairs with her hair. Solicitously, Teyla asked if he could handle bathing by himself. And of course he could, because the alternative was not happening. They let him manage the stairs with his crutches and his duffle, while clutching the garbage bag he was going to tie around his cast. Rodney probably wouldn’t have minded if he’d fallen and broken something else, but Teyla seemed to understand that he would have to break another limb before he would let them treat him like an invalid.

The upstairs confirmed the theory he was working on. One of the two smaller bedrooms was empty, save for two enormous cardboard boxes on the bare floor. He didn’t need to wonder why – scribbled on the box side turned toward the door was ‘DEX’ in big black letters. Sheppard blinked at it for a few seconds, then swung himself out of the doorway. The second smaller bedroom was also mostly empty but evidently in use – Teyla’s banta sticks were lined up against the wall and the floor was covered in thin gym mats. The master bedroom was bizarrely both messy and tidy, and androgynous enough to convince him that Teyla wasn’t sleeping anywhere else. Which, okay, he probably didn’t have the right to be as annoyed about that as he actually was.

Teyla’s side of the large dresser – and Sheppard judged it to be her half because the other side was a tangled mass of men’s socks and few piles of thick academic journals – drew his eye. Elizabeth Weir’s silver pocket watch was curled around itself, the chain dangling slightly over the edge. Unthinking, Sheppard reached out and pushed it back. When he touched it, the links slipped down, revealing a tiny skull-shaped carved wooden bead tucked next to the watch face. Teyla’s mementos of lost friends next to Rodney’s dirty socks, and Sheppard found he was gritting his teeth so hard his face began hurt.

Sheppard went into the master bathroom, stripped down and shoved his leg into the garbage bag. He might have wanted to turn the water to as hot as he could bear, but it took all his concentration to adjust the faucets and stay standing. In fact, he probably could have used some help showering, but he did his best through a combination of standing on one leg and occasionally sitting on the side of the tub. When he was done, he mopped up the small flood he’d created. He dried off, found some clean clothes, and dressed.

When he opened the door, McKay was sitting on the bed. He was drinking from a giant mug of coffee and when Sheppard swung himself through the doorway, he offered up a second mug.

“Thanks,” Sheppard said, but he had to sit down next to McKay before he could take it.

Rodney nodded, and he didn’t even say if Teyla had sent him up in case Sheppard needed rescuing.

“So,” Sheppard said after a second. “You and Teyla, huh?”

McKay was silent, twisting his mouth to the side. Then, he grunted and said, “No. And I was really hoping to keep up the illusion for a little bit longer, because it would have totally driven you crazy.”

 “No,” Sheppard lied. “But you two have gotten cozy.” He patted the bed.

 “She used to sleep on the futon, next door,” McKay said. “It’s just easier and safer, this way. Besides, it’s not like I’m trying to date.” He rolled his eyes.

“Safer?” Sheppard asked, and from the expression on McKay’s face he had a feeling he wasn’t going to like the explanation.

“The night Ronon escaped, a SWAT team broke into the house looking for him,” McKay said. “Because apparently, if I were to rescue my friend from the fascists holding him prisoner, the first place I would bring him is my house, where everyone knows I live. _Morons._ ”

“What happened?”

“I wasn’t actually home,” McKay admitted. “There was an emergency at work, so I wasn’t here. So I don’t know why they thought he was here, since I wasn’t, and even if I was so mentally disabled as to decide to do that, it would have taken me six hours to get him here, anyway.”

“ _Rodney!_ ”

“Hrmmph.” McKay made a vague, almost silly punching gesture with his free hand. “Teyla took out like half of them, and then they tazored her into submission. There was more…bad.” He waved his hand. “Bottom line, we determined that we’re probably being spied on and little things like not sharing a bedroom might be what makes them decide our marriage is a sham and they can lock her back up.”

McKay made a twisted face and looked at Sheppard.

“Oh,” he said, since it was no longer funny and back to being horrible. He took a sip of the coffee, still steaming hot.

“Yeah,” McKay. “Everything sucks, but at least I get to sleep with Teyla. In a literal sense.”

“You have a plan?” Sheppard asked, after a few minutes of mutual silence, coffee-drinking, and stewing.

“I wasn’t sure you were going to come,” McKay snapped back.

That meant no. 

“Why wouldn’t Ronon come to you?” he asked, and it was unintentionally just as brutal as McKay’s retort. “Or Teyla,” he added, trying to soften it.

He half-expected McKay to go off again, but the man just took another sip of coffee and exhaled. Sheppard remembered that this wasn’t days old to him; McKay and Teyla had been handling it for months. McKay had been handling this _alone_ for even longer.

 “Teyla thinks he knows it isn’t safe. They don’t know where he is, but they know where we are.”

“Okay,” Sheppard said. That was reasonable. But all three of them were smart enough to figure out ways around surveillance. If Ronon wasn’t making the effort, it wasn’t because he thought he’d get caught.

“I think it’s probably because I lied to him about every single thing that happened starting from when the mission got recalled,” McKay continued tone absolutely flat. “First I told him they weren’t going to do that. Then I told him he’d be free to go. Then I told him the IOA wasn’t going to put him in a cage. Then I told him I could get him out. Then I told him I’d come back after I got Teyla out.” McKay shifted his weight, agitated. “Providing he even bothered to believe me after they dragged him and Teyla back to the Daedalus in chains, there’s a pretty good chance he no longer trusts me at all.” He glared at Sheppard. “I know I’m not the world’s greatest communicator and after a while I couldn’t see him anymore because they had him in solitary confinement.”

Sheppard seized up at that, moving so abruptly he knocked one of his crutches to the floor.

“Yeah,” McKay said. “I know. He never got to see Teyla. I have no idea what he thinks happened, but he has every reason to think that I either helped or didn’t try hard enough to stop it.” He huffed angrily through his nose, and he kind of sounded like he believed that last part.

Sheppard didn’t say anything. What he was thinking had probably occurred to McKay a long time ago. The one person who could have stood up to the IOA with both authority and political agility was the same person memorialized on the top of the dresser.

“We’ll find him, Rodney,” he said, and then he tried to break the terrible silence. “And I’ll tell him you’re sleeping with Teyla and he will kick your ass.”

Rodney scowled, immediately. “I touched her once, in my sleep. She punched me in the kidneys so hard I thought I was going to go into renal failure.”

“I was _startled_ ,” Teyla said, defensively. Sheppard looked up to find her standing in the doorway.

“Good for you,” he told her.

Teyla crossed the floor, coming to sit on the corner of the bed. She took Sheppard’s crutch and leaned it against her lap. “We are ready?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Sheppard said. "We're ready."

 

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